Versace / Spring 2013 RTW

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Lighter, looser, leggier—three descriptions to contrast with Donatella Versace’s more structured, grown-up, and polished collections of last year. “There is nothing under all those dresses!” she remarked backstage, as the girls were stripping off the few ounces of tie-dyed, featherweight washed silk they’d just been strutting on the runway at the Versace palazzo. “I didn’t use any of the usual construction that goes inside. I wanted to challenge myself to do fluidity and lightness—and to have the ability to change.” “Is it younger, too?” ventured a reporter, tentatively. “Yes. But I am getting younger!” Ms. Versace shot back, laughing. “Maybe it’s for a younger crowd. I stepped out of my comfort zone.”

Well, this collection is certainly true to the original rock-chick vibe of the house of Versace—though with less of the hyper-goth darkness of last season, and while she managed to show plenty of tawny skin, this wasn’t Donatella in bondage body-con mode, either. Instead, she’s turned out a collection that, in parts, might easily turn up at Coachella next summer: head-turning shorts and jeans with lace inserts; breezy, rumpled silk T-shirt dresses with billowy trumpet sleeves; pelmet skirts held together with Western cross-lacing. The cross-body bags would be perfect for hands-free dancing. Feasibly, a girl could crumple an entire Versace festival wardrobe all into a backpack and still having room for her beauty kit. She’d grab one of those elongated black leather blazers as an (almost) cover-up, jump on a plane, and be off.

Not that Ms. Versace neglected to satisfy her red-carpet constituency. Anyone who fancies channeling Cher next summer will be thrilled by the one-shoulder, heavily beaded peacock-blue number. Her long cutaway, flyaway silk dresses, secured to the body (just about) with leather Medusa-head-studded bandolier straps and metal-fringe belts had one young stylist sighing on the way out. “I used to work with Shakira,” she said. “I can just see her going mad for this.”